John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., will be the next speaker in an ongoing series of talks at the University of St. Thomas addressing the challenges facing Catholic higher education today.

Garvey will speak from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 14 at the Anderson Student Center on the school’s St. Paul campus. The free talk is titled “The Challenges of Mission-focused Leadership at a Catholic University.”

Economic and demographic pressures are among the challenges facing Catholic higher education today as well as living up to the charge of “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” to serve as an institutional witness to the convictions of the Catholic Church in an increasingly polarized climate, organizers said.

“Ex Corde Ecclesiae” is the apostolic constitution issued in 1990 by Pope John Paul II that identifies the mission of Catholic higher education.

The speaker series should be of interest to the general public as much as it is to the professional academic community, said Elizabeth Schiltz, professor of law and co-director of St. Thomas’ Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy, one of the sponsors of the series.

“A large part of the general community has attended Catholic universities or is thinking about sending their children to Catholic universities and is very much engaged in and concerned about these kinds of questions,” she said. “We would hope that they would want to continue to hear about what’s going on and be involved in that conversation as consumers and users of these Catholic universities.”

Speakers slated for the fall include:

Father James Burns, director of the Office of Faculty Outreach and Program Assessment at Boston College, speaking on “Creating a Dynamic Vision of Catholic Mission and Identity: A University Experience” on Sept. 3;

Patricia O’Hara of the Notre Dame School of Law who will address “The Catholic University in the 21st Century” on Oct.5.